One of the other buildings gutted was apparently Paradise Gems, a family-run jewellers that had been trading in Tottenham for 25 years. There was a comment on twitter to the effect that no-one from Tottenham would want to burn down Paradise Gems.

Well rumour has it, the police shooting a few nights before has been kept silent because the police officer was shot by another police officer , it’s a rumour at the moment but I suspect some of it might be true.

then other officer panicked and all hell broke lose , if this is so then people are angry as another person dies at the hands of the police and then silence, while I suspect the police gets it’s story right.

I see that Jody McIntyre has been sacked by the Indy for his comments on the riots.
Does Sunny Hundal wish to reconsider his previous collection of posts on McIntyre in which he was outraged at people suggesting that McIntyre was a thug?

When the history of these riots is analysed in a couple of years time, I would be unsurprised if the arson of Carpet Right was not judged as a turning point. Yes, I am arguing that the turning point happened as soon as the riots really kicked off.

The flats above the shop were home to ~50 people and it is remarkable that nobody was seriously injured there (to the best of my knowledge). Anyone who is accused of that arson will be treated severely; English process of law presumes that accused arsonists may be insane so they’ll not be on the wing at their local nick. There were similar arson cases where shops and flats were set alight, which will receive equal scrutiny.

Whilst not wishing to diminish the losses of flat residents, I feel sorry for the building’s owners. They clearly cared about it and its destruction diminishes the area.

Some will see that demolition of the burned out Allied Carpet building in Tottenham as a wonderful job-creating opportunity for local construction workers. Probably, a similar idea motivated the burning of that furniture store at Reeves Corner in Croydon:http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=139240294

Up to the early 1990s recession, my local railway station had a passenger footbridge for changing platforms with many small tough-glass side panels to protect pedestrians from inclement weather. Someone had gone to the trouble of breaking of breaking every panel, quite a task given the number of panels and the tough-glass. Speaking later with a part-time booking office clerk, she said every accessible piece of glass on the station had been broken, including some high up which could only be reached by scaling the outside of the building. Difficult to fathom the rationale except a belief that the vandalism would create unskilled work.